Mortals

by Norman Rush

  They were inching north. They were tacking. They were tacking deeper toward the west than toward the east. They were vamping. They were finding veterinary roads, old trek routes, taking anything leading off the main north-south road and following it until they decided not to follow it anymore. Then they would camp. Or they might return to the main road, where at least they had the comfort of seeing, although at rarer intervals the farther north they got, passing trucks with people in them. Now Ray was fighting the lunatic conviction that he would know the moment when his betrayal definitely occurred, that there would be a sign, that he would feel something. It was possible that this was a useful lunatic conviction, because there had been no sign so far, which meant that nothing had happened. It meant she was resisting and he could be happy. What the sign would be, he had no idea.

  He had had about enough for today. Keletso hated to drive at night, so it made sense to turn around now while they had a chance of making it back to Route 14 in daylight. They would have to sleep in the vehicle again, unless the attraction of some halfway normal accommodation in Sehithlwa, the next settlement up Route 14, would be enough to motivate him to drive at night, against all his better judgment. Ray realized he had no idea what he meant by halfway normal accommodation. Sehithlwa was a Baherero village. One thing that that meant was that everybody went to bed early. No one would be up when they got there. So it was likeliest that they would get back to Route 14 and just pull off and eat and sleep. Of course the sign that Iris had betrayed him was likelier to come at night than during the day, which meant it might come in the form of a dream, a nightmare. More betrayals took place at night, of course, that was obvious. He didn’t think he’d had any particularly striking dreams since leaving Gaborone. That was good.

  Whatever Keletso thought of Ray’s site-assessment performances, he was keeping it to himself. He was a good soldier. Ray was putting less and less effort into his performances, his imposture. He would signal for a stop, descend, make sure his pants cuffs were jammed solidly into his boot tops, spray his lower self with insect repellent, pull the brim of his hat down all around, and set off with his binoculars and clipboard for some spot in the range of one hundred yards from the vehicle. They were within the baobab zone now and he had been selecting locations near particular specimens to carry out his site-assessment charades on. The species had come to fascinate him. They looked untenable, massive gray columns tapering upward and splitting and finishing at the apex in a frenzy of spindly limbs and branches bearing derisory foliage. He hadn’t yet observed anything resembling a grove of baobabs. They seemed to thrive in isolation, although perdure would be a better term for what they did. Birds seemed to avoid them for nesting purposes, if his limited familiarity with the tree could support such a conclusion. The hard, smooth bark of the baobab invited stroking. They inspired affection, of a certain sort. Whatever they were, they were perfect.

  Ray signaled Keletso to stop. He saw a baobab he liked. He and Keletso had evolved a considerable repertoire of hand signals that saved them a lot of surplus talk. In lower gears, the engine made enough noise to render conversation effortful. And he and Keletso shared a preference for silent travel anyway. Ray amplified his hand signal to indicate that Keletso should turn the vehicle around for the return leg, while Ray was doing his assessing. Turning could require some art, depending on road conditions. They had been proceeding in what was in essence a broad, shallow ditch, sticking to the ruts, spoors as they were called, pressed into the soft sand by whoever had preceded them. There was a lay-by, or something like one, just ahead, where a turn could be managed. They had been wrong in choosing the road they had, misled by the fact that the first few kilometers had been freshly groomed, in the usual way, by a government truck dragging a monster bouquet of thornbushes along the surface. So it had seemed promising. But the grooming task had been abandoned. The thornbush bouquet had been jettisoned and pushed up on the shoulder. The government truck curved off straight into the veld, possibly in pursuit of opportunities to do some poaching. Keletso had detected duikers moving through this neighborhood, in the distance, twice.

  Ray leaned against the baobab and watched Keletso delicately maneuvering the Land Cruiser for the return journey. How long these monumental vegetables lived was something he should be able to find out. They looked ancient. He wouldn’t mind being buried under one of them, being drawn up molecule by molecule into the ridiculousness and permanence they represented, if they were, in fact, longlived, like sequoias. He loved these goddamned things. They were like monuments, but slightly gesticulating monuments, when the breeze rattled their silly branches. He wasn’t being mordant. Everybody had to be buried someplace. He assumed he was going to be cremated when he died, but ashes had to go someplace too, and under a baobab would be fine with him. Molecules weren’t the smallest particles, though, nor were, what, electrons. All he could think of were monads, which came from Leibnitz and philosophy and not physics. He thought, Au fond we are monads, with gonads. He moved around to the far side of the baobab, where he was out of Keletso’s sight line.

  The realization that you, yourself, are going to die, in fact, declares itself in funny ways, he thought. He could give a new example. Iris, in assembling the mountain of reading matter she wanted him to have, had included three months’ worth of unread Times Literary Supplements. And as he was reading through them, in the desert, he had noticed that his reflexive impulse to tear out and save advertisements for books he might want to read at some point was gone. A year or so back he had given up clipping titles from the Books Received listings of the TLS, which he could see had been precursory to this. Something was letting him know that there was enough on his forward reading list to occupy him for the rest of this life. In fact, there had been a longer progression. He had been serious about bibliography, cutting out ads neatly and gluing them to index cards color-coded for urgency. Then he had devolved to tearing ads out. And so on down. And now he had enough in his stuffed folders, enough. He had been serious. He had thought of literature and Milton in particular as subjects he would conquer like Shackleton or whoever it was had gotten to the Pole first, but not Shackleton, Peary or Amundsen, who? Definitely not Shackleton, he thought, shivering. He was getting old. He thought, In my time machine I would probably, before I went to Milton’s deathbed, go to Shackleton and the other one, Scott, and say Don’t go, leave the wastelands of the world and stay home … Grow old and perish at home in the arms of your wife … Goodbye and good luck.

  It was time to write on his site-assessment form. It was something he had to do, had to be seen doing. He had put down a few scribbles already, during his approach to the baobab, for Keletso’s benefit. But, out of Keletso’s view, he would do something new. It had started as a joke but it had turned into something a little interesting. Instead of jotting down fake notes and observations, he had tried relaxing and closing his eyes and going blank and letting himself write in a dissociated state, or as much of one as he could attain. It was automatic writing, a weak variant. It was something to do. So far mostly he had gotten poetic flotsam, weird doggerel, grandiose self-instruction, pure nonsense, and sequences written so illegibly it was impossible to tell what was meant. He slid down to a squatting position and set the clipboard on the sand in front of him. Another nice thing about baobabs was that tampan ticks avoided them, the shade cast by the baobabs being so negligible. He got his Bic out. He tried. He had waited too long to get started. This wouldn’t work if he felt pressed. But he tried. He hummed to distract himself. He wrote a little. He hummed more vigorously, the Ode to Joy, always his first choice when he needed a tune to block something out, distract him. He was trying. It was no good. He couldn’t let go. He looked at what he’d written.

  o hell o hell you look so well I’d like to touch

  your Annabel

  o brother snake I am awake

  Ah me and my I like to die he hit my eye go home

  ye fly

  Thy alabaster cities gleam from
>
  she to shining she

  This was his worst effort. Thy should be thine. The glints from the dim past were boring. As a child he had thought someone saying He hit my fist with his eye was funny. He had known what he was writing as he was writing. The Bic was wrong. With the Bic he had to bear down too much. A pencil required less pressure and the results had been better, although still stupid. He got up to go.

  Lately his appetite was problematic. His clothes were fitting more loosely. Keletso didn’t like it and was being maternal. Keletso wanted him to eat what he had just been handed. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was a mass. He probed it and concluded that it was a concoction of two kinds of dried fruit, apricot and pear, boiled soft. He was supposed to eat it with some of the warm box milk. He couldn’t.

  Keletso was eating his own portion demonstratively. Ray was touched. It was possible that he could eat some, a little. They sat in the solid heat.

  It was definite that government presence in the region was withdrawing, ceasing to be, where it had existed at all, in widely separated nodes, hamlets strung along the main north-south route. They were finding government offices closed, with no explanations for the closures posted. Government vehicle traffic was down to almost nothing. They were still seeing the occasional Wildlife officer. The last one they had seen had told them that the two fishing camps between Sepopa and the Caprivi Strip, on the western edge of the Okavango, had been closed, mysteriously.

  Keletso was waving a shaker of cinnamon at him. He accepted it. Keletso wanted him to sprinkle cinnamon on his compote.

  It was Ray’s turn to hold the umbrella support, but Keletso was refusing to relinquish it to him and at the same time making head motions indicating that it was more important for Ray to concentrate on eating. So he ate.

  Keletso said, “Rra, someway you must phone up your wife, isn’t it?”

  Ah, Ray thought. This was bold of Keletso. He was picking up that their radiophone contacts with Gaborone had stopped, just about. Clearly it worried him. They had gone four days without being able to find a link. Keletso was beginning to appreciate the strangeness of the zone they were in. So far Keletso hadn’t asked for any messages to be passed along when they had managed to make calls. He mailed something once. He was a bachelor.

  Ray said, “You’re not married, yourself, rra, you told me.”

  “Not as yet.”

  “So, still, do you have any need to send word to anyone, when we phone next? Do you, rra?”

  “Yah, well, no.”

  “I apologize for not asking.”

  “It is fine because in any case we must be returning back soon.”

  Ray nodded vaguely. Keletso wanted to be reassured that this was going to end soon. Ray couldn’t help him. He didn’t know when it would end. He was waiting for a sign. But it was definitely time to get back, from any standpoint. He had had a nocturnal emission, for one thing. He thought, No it’s nomads with gonads, what we are.

  Keletso said, “Rra, I must find a wife yet. I am searching even now.” He swept his hand around broadly.

  The man was in his forties and seeking his true love. Ray hoped he found her soon and that no one would take her away once he had. Constant Pain would be a good title for something.

  “Because, rra, you can see, else we cannot be at ease. So I must seek. She can be hereabout. It is no matata if she can be from the bush and be pleasing to me, I can take her. You see, a wife is like some rose flower. And as well the Bible commands us to marry. So we must search about.”

  Ray made a show of looking around, and they laughed together.

  “Have you some children, then?” Keletso asked.

  “No, none. We were unable to.”

  “Ah, shame.”

  “Yes.”

  “Rra, if you can pray, God can aid you. Even as you are older than some fathers. If you pray you can go back and see your wife and she can say, Ehe I have fallen pregnant whilst you were off.”

  “That would be truly amazing.”

  “It can only be if you pray.”

  “I understand you.”

  “I can tell you from the Bible that many an old man, monna mogolo, is made to be a father, by God, nonetheless.”

  “Yes,” Ray said. He had eaten everything.

  Nothing prepares you for life as a human, Ray thought, and when Keletso looked questioningly at him he knew he had uttered his thought-gem aloud, which was not good and was a thing that was happening too much in the last day or so. He was declaring his vacuity. With his thought-gems he was like the drunk at the last embassy party who had taken him aside to say, portentously, Life is sincere.

  “Sorry,” Ray said.

  He needed to watch it. He was shooting his mind off. Yesterday it had been necessary to attempt an explanation for exclaiming It’s Edward Young, for Christ’s sake. In his head he had been unaccountably attributing the line O my coevals to Milton and it had been a relief to suddenly have it right again. At times Keletso was seeming a touch afraid of him. He couldn’t have that.

  The day was the mixture as before, cruelly bright and hot. Earlier Keletso had pointed out two or three rogue thunderheads off to the northeast, but now the sky was unembellished. They were six hours west of Nokaneng, and that was as far west as he wanted to be. Dust, blowing, was an increasing problem, away from the delta. It would look better if they could return eastward without retracing their route, to enable him to stare at fresh territory in accordance with his supposed mission, so he had decided that they should leave the track they had been following and transit six kilometers of open bush with the aim of reaching a grade four veterinary road indicated on their sector map. So far the map had been reasonably reliable. The area to be crossed was hardpan, very level, treeless for the most part. They should be fine. So far, aside from having to circumnavigate a single long low dune, they were proceeding uneventfully.

  Ray tried to doze, succeeding fitfully for a while until a change in the light registered through the blankness he was cultivating. The air was gray and seething. They had entered a phenomenon, a storm of flies, not just a cloud of them following the vehicle but a dense swarm extending out indefinitely on all sides. It was appalling, which was the right word, since it was a pall of flies, in fact. Iris liked the Exaltation of Larks game and was good at it. A pall of funeral directors would be a candidate for the game and so would a pox of whores or rash of whores or rash of dermatologists, but what constructs that she had come up with could he remember? He remembered some of his, a skeleton crew of coroners, a surplus of misers, a dearth of nonentities, but he didn’t want his, he wanted hers. He wanted her. She was fun, his wife.

  Keletso was being stalwart but it was clear he was unnerved. He was sweating and murmuring. The explanation for the flies had to be something arising from rainfall, sudden heavy rainfall. The locality they were in had received a drenching. They had passed abruptly from furnace to steambath conditions. The windows were fogging. One of Keletso’s thunderheads had obviously delivered, and the sudden moisture had either drawn or hatched, if that was possible, this abomination. He had never read about it, but there had to be a connection.

  There seemed to be two kinds of flies involved in the spectacle, big clumsy ones interested in banging against the vehicle, and smaller and faster glittering ones not. To the right was a long object on the ground not immediately recognizable as the carcass it must be because it was clad in a seamless, glinting, writhing coat of flies. This would not be the place to die.

  He was sorry for Iris. He had gotten her when she was young. In retrospect, that was a problem. Her premarital sexual experience had been so paltry it was unfair. It was pathetic. He was what there was of her sexual universe, with, as he recalled, two ancient exceptions, both unsatisfactory. How her condition could be what, undone, reversed, at this stage of the game without terrible pain he had no idea, but she had a right and he recognized it and he loved her. He needed to keep in mind her mother, how dreamily repressive her benighted m
other had been when it came to sex. After all, Iris had been thirteen years old before she realized it was permissible to actively wash her genitals as opposed to gazing up at the ceiling and whistling something merry while soapy water passively traversed them in the shower. She had made the discovery during a summertime visit to the country place of one of her girlfriends whom she had observed routinely giving herself a good scrub between the legs, case closed. It was licit. But when he said she had a right he meant that she did and she didn’t at the same time, because there was a preexisting deal of course, their marriage, all his love, their love, years of it, her vows and his, of course. All he knew was that he had to keep her. And if he could possibly construe Morel as someone for her to be into and out of, and then back to him and into his arms wiser and with a better sample of the real world of unsleeping penises and a notch on her garter belt that would make her feel better, then … then good luck with construing, since it looked like he was going to be unable to expel her doctor from his personal universe by the main scenario he had come up with. He thought, Help me, but it would say something if she came back to me post facto, not that I can bear to think about it. He was full of pain again. If it would help her after the fact, he could concoct a lie about fucking someone he hadn’t, but that would require conviction, details, be impossible. Don’t ask me to, he thought. He couldn’t. Keletso was mumbling that it had been a mistake to leave a gazetted road. Ray was in no position to disagree. He would try not to propose doing it in the future. Keletso had turned the windscreen wipers on, the flies were so thick.